Having been born in an osteopathic hospital, with an osteopathic physician father and osteopathic physician uncles (my mother’s bothers), I began this life partial to the profession. As an osteopathic physician, who proposed and then served on the founding board the Osteopathic International Alliance, there can be no doubt I am a serious fan.

I also understand the problems facing our osteopathic organizations:

Physicians limiting memberships due to the economy

Finding ways to reach MDs & DOs with educational programs

How to reach those who completed allopathic residencies

Electronic journals make advertising a challenge and ROI questionable

Emails change frequently making it a challenge to maintain databases

Out of sight, out of mind - Driving traffic to your website is tougher than it looks

Little extra revenue for advertising

Two years ago, I served as the president of my specialty college, one of the smaller specialty colleges in the profession. Trying to grow the college, I took a survey of current & recent board members.

Eightypercent knew people who should be involved with our college, but weren’t. The next question was - how do we get them involved? Some said invite them to speak, members get a member, have board members call and invite them to become a member or have volunteers call and invite them to become members.

But frankly, most people are extremely uncomfortable with direct solicitation, even with friends for a good cause, let alone cold-calling colleagues. Given that, it seemed like a better way to lose active members than gain them.

Why this route to marketing the profession?

OMM was created to provide elegant solutions to identify who we are and that we are active in the community, as well as provide services to the profession by:

Increasing Visibility

a. The Public – feels better their physician is a member of a larger professional organization and does in fact attend CME.

b.Colleagues - It is a zero pressure means to bring up the discussion of why members are involved. And it is usually started by the nonmember! All the member has to do is look good and answer a few ridiculously easy questions e.g. when/where do you meet, etc.

These are products your members already shop for, buy and wear. We offer competitive prices & ship directly to their home or office.

4.Convenience – There is no cost, no inventory and no paperwork for the group! There is norisk to the organization! Items are cost competitive & shipped directly to the member at no extra charge. We provide quarterly reporting of sales to our partner members along with royalties.

Because we have done convention planning for years, we can also assist groups with their convention needs. Because we serve with a mission, we can obtain discounts far below what organizations might be able to find on their own.

BOTTOM LINE:

We want to help you add value to your member’s experience & add new members!

A few final thoughts -

About 14 years ago, I was at the World Health Organization’s annual conference, meeting with an Assistant Director General & her staff. At the time, we had about 43,000 DOs, and I was explaining that we were a minority medical profession in the States. She and her direct reports were both amazed and perplexed by my comment. She said, “Minority profession – do you not realize that that is more physicians than whole regions of the world have, such as Africa, the Pacific and the Middle East?”

Today, we have over 80,000 DOs and 20% of the American medical students are in our pipelines. I dare say, if a person had 80,000 people working for them, a virtual unknown could become president of the United States!

If we can harness that power, we can change the question from, “what’s a DO?” to “Who’s a DO?”